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It’s a Fashion Show for Sports Teams

Sports teams once had simple fashion rules. Wear one uniform at home, usually white, and another on the road.

But in recent years, locker rooms have become more like Hollywood wardrobes, crammed with multiple uniform options in a riot of colors and fabrics, most produced in the workshops of the rival Houses of Nike, Under Armour and Adidas.

There are nearly as many explanations for the new trend as there are new looks. Some teams see branding opportunities, and colleges have found that flashy, colorful, sleeker uniforms are attractive to recruits. But college and professional teams know that multiple styles can stoke merchandise sales. A fan who buys a white jersey might also buy a red one and a black one, and even a throwback model or a Spanish-language version.

“It used to be your uniform lasted for a generation or a decade, and now it’s once a week,” said Paul Lukas, the creator of the Uni Watch blog, who believes the uniform buffet represents a broader cultural shift. “This mirrors the notion of having to check your email and Twitter feed every few minutes because people need a fresh jolt of stimulation.”

The result is that in addition to coaches, trainers and video coordinators, each team has its own de facto in-house stylist. At colleges, where the style revolution is most obvious and the rules much looser, that role may be filled by the football coach or an equipment manager, often in conjunction with its apparel maker.

Sometimes, the choice of what to wear is left to the players, muscular fashion’s 21st century runway models.

Oregon scripts its football outfits the spring before each season to properly coordinate its home and road costuming with the weather, the season, the time of day and even the opponents’ uniforms.

“I’ll say to the team at Nike, ‘Some of the guys requested this look or that or they want to see this combination,’ and Nike will put together the script,” said Kenny Farr, the Ducks’ football equipment administrator.

At West Virginia, the Mountaineers’ veteran players usually decide each Tuesday how to mix and match the blue, gold and white Nike uniforms unveiled this season.

“I like the all-white look,” said Dan Nehlen, the West Virginia football equipment manager. “The players picked a combination this year of an all-white uniform and a gold helmet. I didn’t like it one bit. There wasn’t enough gold in the white to make the gold helmet stand out.”

The Miami Heat, the two-time defending N.B.A. champions, have adopted a long-term plan that will have them play in nine uniforms this season, by far the most in the league. Red on white. Gold on white. Black on red. All black. The Heat’s schedule points to 19 dates on which they will wear special jerseys, a less-than subtle cue to fans to go buy their own replicas.

“We established a uniform progression program in 2009,” said Michael McCullough, the Heat’s chief marketing officer, “where we laid out for the next few years a series of uniforms we’d introduce to complete the traditional uniforms. We use them to create stories and as a brand-building and retail opportunity.”

McCullough said that the N.B.A. coordinated what the teams wore so color schemes did not clash. But as the Knicks and the Atlanta Hawks recently discovered, such coordination is not always foolproof.

The Knicks took the court Saturday at Madison Square Garden in their new deep orange uniforms — technically a “light” color according to the N.B.A. style guide — while the Atlanta Hawks wore all-too-similar red ones. The resulting clash made it difficult to tell friend from foe and created a torrent of criticism among viewers. The N.B.A. announced the next day that it would address its rules to ensure a similar fashion faux pas did not reoccur.

Apparel companies that are able to use campuses as laboratories see their role as interpreting the desires of players and the universities.

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“Young players coming to the universities love to look different,” said Matt Mirchin, the executive vice president of Under Armour.

For the most adventurous football clients like Oregon, each selection requires accessorizing jerseys and pants with helmets, socks, cleats, gloves, underwear, and wrist and bicep bands. If a manufacturer cannot persuade a program like Alabama to execute a makeover, they are happy to outfit them in the newest fast-drying, no-grab fabrics.

“The athletes wouldn’t describe it as style, but as game-day preparation,” said Todd Van Horne, Nike’s vice president and global creative director for football. “They describe it to me as the mentality they need to perform their best; that if the uniform is right and all the visual cues are set, that flips the switch for them. They become the game-day warrior, the superhero they envision themselves as.”

The changes could keep fashion writers busy 24/7 chronicling them. At Arizona State two years ago, Nike injected extra ferocity into the Sun Devils’ helmet logo by modifying the prongs on its pitchfork; last month, the Sun Devils wore a special edition helmet with a flame design.

Earlier this year, Adidas listened to David Sayler, the newly hired athletic director at Miami (Ohio), who looked at his football team’s uniform and decided something was missing.

“I saw the M on the helmet, the M on the pants and the M on the neckline, but I didn’t see Miami anywhere,” he said.

Adidas created uniforms with Miami written boldly across the players’ shoulders and on their red helmets, which now bear a shimmering silver-feathered design to evoke the program nickname, the RedHawks.

“I wanted to make the Miami name relevant,” Sayler said.

Unfortunately, uniforms do not win games. Miami is 0-11.

While colleges can alter their looks as often as they desire, teams in Major League Baseball, the N.F.L, the N.B.A. and the N.H.L. are bound by stricter rules at the league level. All have to wait three to five years before they can change their regular uniforms. But there is leniency. Leagues know that embracing fashion means firing up retail sales; they simply keep the process from spreading anarchically. They oversee programs that allow teams to wear championship, classic, ethnic and throwback uniforms, some of them just for one game.

With their nine uniforms, the Heat are stretched to the haberdashery limit. They have standard home white and road black uniforms and a chifforobe jammed with more, including one with sleeves for Christmas Day, another that revives the franchise’s original black road uniform, and one with the players’ first names or nicknames on the backs of their jerseys (to be worn against the Boston Celtics and the Nets).

Other teams rarely, if ever, change their look. The Yankees do not reverse their pinstripes on weekends or gussy up their road grays with yellow spikes. Alabama has no trouble luring recruits to Tuscaloosa with uniforms that Bear Bryant would recognize. But the St. Louis Cardinals, a classic uniform stalwart, caused a stir this past season when it added a home alternate for Saturday games that had St. Louis written across the chest, not Cardinals. They wore it during Game 3 of the World Series.

Some uniform makeovers rile the fashion police, but the patriotic uniform worn Saturday by Northwestern against Michigan generated more than just style criticism. Usually clad in purple, white and black, Northwestern instead wore gray uniforms made by Under Armour with what appeared to be weathered shards of the American flag across the shoulders and helmets, down the pants and on the players’ socks and gloves. Names on the backs of the players’ jerseys were replaced by the words Courage, Honor, Duty, Commitment, Integrity, Courage and Service.

It was an arresting and busy look that Boston College and Hawaii wore last year, and it is designed to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project. But after Deadspin noted that the distressed red coloring looked like blood, an athletic department spokesman apologized for “misconceptions” about what it represented.

“I’m a coach, not a designer,” Northwestern Coach Pat Fitzgerald said, recalling when he first saw the uniform’s design. “So they explained the pattern and that the stars and stripes were inspired by the flag. I never thought of it being anything other than that.”